Here Is New York by E. B. White
Posted: August 15, 2026 Filed under: New York Leave a comment
Can you triangulate* where Elwyn Brooks White’s hotel room was?:
I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher’s office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of the public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, five blocks from where I used to usher at the Metropolitan Opera and only a hundred and twelve blocks from the spot where Clarence Day the Elder was washed of his sins in the Church of the Epiphany (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless after-noons, Lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without.
Hint: if he stayed at that hotel today he could get Marriott Bonvoy points.
The whole thing is available online but I didn’t mind paying for this handsome volume. This old cover is cool:
It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. Every time the residents brush their teeth, millions of gallons of water must be drawn from the Catskills and the hills of Westchester.
When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube-pfft-just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils. Every time an incision is made in the pavement, the noisy surgeons expose ganglia that are tangled beyond belief. By rights New York should have destroyed itself long ago, from panic or fire or rioting or failure of some vital supply line in its circulatory system or from some deep labyrinthine short circuit.
Long ago the city should have experienced an insoluble traffic snarl at some impossible bottleneck. It should have perished of hunger when food lines failed for a few days. It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums or carried in by ships’ rats. It should have been overwhelmed by the sea that licks at it on every side. The workers in its myriad cells should have succumbed to nerves, from the fearful pall of smoke-fog that drifts over every few days from Jersey, blotting out all light at noon and leaving the high offices suspended, men groping and depressed, and the sense of world’s end. It should have been touched in the head by the August heat and gone off its rocker.
The pneumatic tube mail system is one of those astounding trivia items.
Every facility is inadequate-the hospitals and schools and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin-the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.
To an outlander a stay in New York can be and often is a series of small embarrassments and discomforts and disappointments: not understanding the waiter, not being able to distinguish between a sucker joint and a friendly saloon, riding the wrong subway, being slapped down by a bus driver for asking an innocent question, enduring sleepless nights when the street noises fill the bedroom. Tourists make for New York, particularly in summertime-they swarm all over the Statue of Liberty (where many a resident of the town has never set foot), they invade the Automat, visit radio studios, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and they window shop. Mostly they have a pretty good time.
But sometimes in New York you run across the disillusioned—a young couple who are obviously visitors, newlyweds perhaps, for whom the bright dream has vanished. The place has been too much for them; they sit languishing in a cheap restaurant over a speechless meal.
Gasping and remembering things:
I am, at the moment of writing this, living not as a neighborhood man in New York but as a transient, or vagrant, in from the country for a few days.
Summertime is a good time to reexamine New York and to receive again the gift of privacy, the jewel of Loneliness. In summer the city contains except for tourists) only die-hards and authentic characters. No casual, spotty dwellers are around, only the real article.
And the town has a somewhat relaxed air, and one can lie in a loincloth, gasping and remembering things.
During the somewhat mawkish* time after 9/11, when people looked for meanings to cling to, I’m sure this paragraph was seen as prophetic:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the mil-lions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
The introduction by Roger Angell is harsh on the city:
If Andy White could visit New York once again (he died in 1985), I think he would want to rush back home to Maine the same afternoon, appalled by its crime and violence, dismayed by the worsening conditions in the inner city and the enormous, widening distance between the city’s impoverished minorities and grossly rich Upper East Siders, and turned off by a sharp diminishment in charm and tone. Fifth Avenue, he would find, has been Trumped, and Broadway Disneyfied. New Yorkers, who once prided themselves on their sophistication, talk eagerly about money and celebrity now, and dress uniformly in black; they’re in great shape but don’t seem to be having much fun. Still, I would urge White to stick around for the weekend (he could stay at my place), and while he was here l’d take him to Central Park, which has never looked better or been more enjoyed.
Maybe Mamdani should bring back the pneumatic tubes.
This essay was first published in Holiday magazine:
Maybe the second most famous piece published in Holiday is Faulkner’s essay on Mississippi.
*this seemed like exactly the kind of puzzle a computer would be good at, so I fed it to Claude. Despite my clear instruction to not cheat by determining where the text was from, it still did that.
*is that fair to say? people grieve in different ways. but it did seem to me that post-9/11 our collective reaction could reach levels that were sickly sentimental. I mean stuff like this. But maybe I should be more gracious in to how people respond to horrible and shocking events.
Helytimes 